Adam Ryland originally developed Extreme Warfare as a collectible card game with a wrestling theme.
Each version of the game was an upgrade of the previous and continually built on the ideas of booking matches and running the business side of a professional wrestling promotion.
This setup would end up being the basis of all match report screens in later games in the series up to and including TEW 2004.
This also coincided with the new feud system that was to count the matches, angles and interview victories between the workers involved.
Relationships between workers were added to help bring in backstage politics where people are more willing put over their friends and less with their enemies.
Eventually workers could also be in multiple tag teams with a statistic for experience which increases with each match fought together.
A momentum meter was also added to the wrestlers to bring in more realism in that if they give great matches, cut good interviews and participate in angles, it will increase and thus gain more overness.
This helped to prevent the user from booking the same over people all the time and expect good ratings.
TEW 2005 also made more features customizable with its new editable statistics for angles, storylines, locations and injuries.
Its angle editor consisted of many different types such as interviews to beatdowns to celebrations and uses up to six people to participate in various roles.
The storyline editor was created by Phil Parent, using Georges Polti's book The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations as an inspiration.
Instead of having an exact view of the stats each wrestler has along with changes, a more realistic grade feature was instead added to make the user rely on instinct for crucial decisions.
A new installment of the series, Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 (TEW 2008), was announced on the Grey Dog Software website on January 1, 2008.
[4] Some of the new features announced included a revamp of backstage morale, and several changes to improve the interface and to reduce the amount of time it takes to navigate through the game and to book a show.
[5] Some of the new features announced included an Autobooker, Fog Of War, Tribute Shows, Shoot Interviews, Legacies, and several other changes to help either make the game more realistic, and opened up more options in the database Total Extreme Wrestling 2013 was released on December 16, 2012, with the demo version available on December 9.
[6] The developer's journal announced that the game would feature elements that would add more realism and would also include things such as backstage cliques.
[8] On December 8, 2018, it was announced that Total Extreme Wrestling 2020 (TEW 2020) is in development with an estimate release of April 2020.
[9] The announcement stated that Ryland had completely rewritten the code before reinserting older features to make the game "effectively a much sharper, quicker, more intuitive, better quality piece of work" and promised that TEW 2020 would be "the biggest jump forward in terms of quality the series has ever seen".
The developer's journal, beginning on the day of the announcement, was split into multiple phases, the first phase being announcements of new and returning features which had already been added beginning December 10, 2018, and ending July 12, 2019, while the second phase, which began July 29, 2019, and is currently ongoing, is a "live" journal discussing features currently being worked on and the current level of completion of the default game world, "The Cornellverse".
[10] Some of the highly-requested features added include playing as a company's developmental territory[11] and giving the player more control over house shows.